The present invention relates to production management, and more particularly to a system and method capable of dynamically adjusting lot priority.
Supply chain performs the functions of purchase of materials, transformation of these materials into intermediate and finished products, and distribution of these finished products to customers. The supply of services is in many ways similar to the supply of products. To strengthen competitiveness, supply chain management has become an important issue to meet the goals of reduced inventory and increased productivity, and particularly to enhance service quality.
On-time delivery is critical to successful supply chain management, that is, it is necessary to closely and carefully monitor the lot processing progress in order to achieve the goal. Currently, a manufacturing department sets different targets for respective lots everyday, and these daily targets must be accomplished to ensure on-time delivery. According to the daily targets, supervisors are concerned with the lot processing progress, and collect related information from different sources, such as product databases, planning systems, manufacturing execution systems, and others to determine whether those targets have been fulfilled. If the rate of progress of a lot falls behind its target, supervisors must manually survey all related lots and properly adjust the lot priority in order to meet the desired target. Since there is no mechanism to automatically and dynamically adjust lot processing priority, however, manual surveying is inefficient in gathering related information.
Additionally, conventional adjustment ignores production variance between the relative operation completion times between lots. Thus, the inevitable production variance between lots adds to the difficulty of achieving an optimized distribution of Work-In-Process (i.e., the lots) over the entire production schedule, resulting in short supply of some specific lots, particularly lots with low priority, and resulting failure of on-time delivery.